Big names joined the love-in. Rev. Jesse Jackson tweeted in praise: “Hugh Hefner was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement. We shall never forget him. May he Rest In Peace.”

Then there was Larry King, Nancy Sinatra, Paris Hilton (who will “miss him dearly”) and Kim Kardashian, who declared her love and gratitude for being part of the “Playboy Family” (she appeared on a 2007 Christmas cover, because nothing says Christmas like breasts spilling out of a red body suit).

He “wanted to make the world a happier, sexier place” gushed CNN. One conservative journal even stated that Hefner’s “work celebrates the sexual complementarity that has bound men and women together since the dawn of time.”

That a pimp and sexual predator could be glorified as an angel, a role model for men and indeed some kind of saviour figure leading us out of darkness, shows how successfully the Hefner/Playboy myth has been embedded in the popular imagination.

A serial collector of women who kept women as pets, like cute bouncing creatures in a petting zoo, is being hailed a hero. A man whose harem of wives, girlfriends, mistresses and rotating cast of Girls Next Door was projected for the vicarious pleasure of millions of men, is, apparently, a modern secular saint.

While many think Hefner’s entire genre involved dewy young women smiling topless in a cornfield, he legitimized and mainstreamed the sex-trade and provided the economic, cultural and legal structures for the current multi-billion dollar market of today and its more hardcore and gonzo evolutions.

By popularizing the selling of female flesh through his global industrial masturbation complex, Hefner gave men permission to see woman as existing for their own pleasure – that treating women as sex objects was, indeed, what sophistication looked like. Valuing sexual conquest over intimacy and tenderness has affected probably every woman and girl on the planet ever since. (I have previously documented the experiences of girls with porn-conditioned boys.)

What Hefner achieved was not liberation. It was objectification on an industrial scale. The fact that his magazine was prized more as a masturbatory prop than for its highbrow articles is reflected in the comment in the documentaryHugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel. Says grinning singer Tony Bennett: “He gave us some of the best literature of our time … when they got past masturbating they sort of read more …”

So progressive was Playboy, in fact, that men were also offered women of colour for their onanistic satisfaction. Somehow, objectifying black women as morsels on the masturbation banquet is heralded as a revolutionary step in the civil rights movement rather than just objectification in another colour. Jennifer Jackson was the first black Playmate in 1965 – two years after Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech.” That, it seems, is what breaking down racial barriers looks like: men can ogle naked black bodies as well as white. What a great achievement for African Americans!

All the same, Hefner himself admitted that blond, white women made up most of the models in his pages. “We try to get some ethnic diversity, but we do seem to lean in the direction of blonds,” he said.

The brutality of sex with Saint Hef

So, was he really a man who merely loved women? A look inside the Playboy Mansion tests the theory. Beneath the glamorous image, Hefner’s playmates testify to filthy rooms, urine soaked carpets thanks to nine dogs, bunnies having to line up and watch and wait for their $1000 a week allowance until Hefner had collected the dog faeces, and strict curfews and iron gates to keep the women in check.

As for the sex, there was no protection. Bunny girls were offered Quaaludes, which Hefner himself called “thigh openers.” Although disgusted at the prospect of having sex with him, the “girls” understood that it was “part of the unspoken rules.” “It was almost as if we had to do it in return for all the things we had,” said one.

“I have never had a more disconnected experience. There was zero intimacy involved. No kissing, nothing. It was so brief that I can’t even recall what it felt like beyond having a heavy body on top of mine.”

“He was more interested in watching. He would hire famous male porn stars, including John Holmes, with huge penises and watch them have sex with different girls he brought in. Hugh sat there in his favorite chair, smoking a joint and eating red licorice and watching. I had to go into the room afterwards and if the girls couldn’t walk, I would have to escort them to the bedrooms so they could recuperate. Hef sometimes gave bonuses to the women because the sex acts were so painful.”

“Hef wasn’t a kind man … He was very brutal to his girlfriends and sex partners. He made sure they had breast implants. In those days, the implants were new and they would shift and burst and I witnessed many women who had this done begging and crying to Hef to help them and he would put them back in the hospital and then discard these women. He didn’t care. They were disposable.”

A high number of Playmates have died young from drug overdose, suicide, homicide, or some other unnatural cause, including Bill Cosby’s particular favourite who later ended it all with a bullet to the head.

Playboy: A paedophile playground

It wasn’t just official Playboy bunnies who were expected to serve Saint Hef. Laurin Crosson, a fellow activist and sex industry survivor who runs a safe house for women escaping prostitution in the United States, shared this on her (personal) Facebook page:

“But especially thanks for asking me if your ‘photographer’ could take a picture of my vagina for your ‘private collection’, you asked this in front of a room of people, all seeming to laugh at my uncomfortable stutter. I was 16. I was scared and felt so pressured.”

Hefner liked to display the charms of the younger members of the female species. They were used as centrefolds and playmates, diversifying the masturbatory mix on offer to his loyal followers. This truth relating to Playboy’s girl-child centrefolds and bunny-eared girl children has not been properly acknowledged – certainly not by the writers of rosy obituaries. How could this practice go unremarked by so many?

Playboy linked “innocent children with strong Playboy orgasm-based stimuli” in the words of U.S. researcher Judith Reisman, who documented Playboy’s treatment of pre-pubescent girls. Playboy, Reisman found, was deliberate in its eroticization of girl children. In one year alone, 39% of Playboy centrefolds were of children under 12. Brooke Shields, then 10, was posed as paedo-fantasy material in Playboy Press 1975 publication Sugar N Spice, made up to look like an adult woman in a girl’s body. Eva Ionesco, at 11, became the youngest model ever to appear in a Playboy nude pictorial. One image, depicting a girl lying face down naked with a doll on Disney sheets, is captioned: “BABY DOLL. It’s easy to feel paternalistic toward the cuddly type above. Naturally, she digs forceful father figures, so come on strong, Big Daddy.”

Then there were the child sex abuse cartoons, also documented by U.S. psychiatrist and feminist Linnea Smith. While denying it would ever publish such offensive imagery, Smith located published pictures of children in sexual (abuse) encounters with adults.

Sexual violence, and other forms of “Entertainment for Men”

Playboyrape cartoons, making a joke out of the gravest human rights violation experienced by women, were also popular. In 1986, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin appeared before the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography observed of the rape porn genre:

“When your rape is entertainment, your worthlessness is absolute. You have reached the nadir of social worthlessness. The civil impact of pornography on women is staggering. It keeps us socially silent, it keeps us socially compliant, it keeps us afraid in neighborhoods; and it creates a vast hopelessness for women, a vast despair. One lives inside a nightmare of sexual abuse that is both actual and potential, and you have the great joy of knowing that your nightmare is someone else’s freedom and someone else’s fun.”

Wife beating also fit within the magazine’s “Entertainment for Men” subtitle. As recently as 2000, Playboypublished a Romanian article entitled “How to Beat Your Wife… Without Leaving Prints,” which provided instructions in carrying out wife battery without getting caught.

Behold, then, your hero of the sexual revolution: paedo-fantasies, girl children depicted being violated, rape comics, sniggers over sexual harassment in the workplace, wife battery as the stuff of humour – on these evils, Hefner’s celebrity sycophants have nothing to say.

Hefner feminism: Exploitation, not empowerment

As if these crimes were not enough, Hefner also helped colonise the world with porn culture: his tentacles extending to Playboy-themed products for children – including baby jumpsuits and dummies – and young people. Just take, for instance, accessory store Diva selling Playboy-themed necklaces to girls (including “Playmate of the month” themes), Priceline selling Playboy makeup (“Hef’s favourite lip gloss”), Adairs bedding store selling Playboy sheets, and Bras N Things with its Playboy range.

“Hefner feminism is all around us. It’s the feminism of pre-teen girls seeking designer vaginas; of men who rent out vaginas and wombs; of women who diet, shave, starve and never say no. We’re not free from oppression, but oppression is no longer stigmatised. Isn’t that enough?”

It is also the feminism of many young women known to me, who subject themselves to porn-flavoured photoshoots and post their images on Instagram with the hashtags like #feminism and #empowerment alongside – because this is how empowerment is packaged to girls in porn culture.

But Hefner was not about equality or empowerment for women. (The self-interested funding of abortion rights doesn’t count – after all, pregnant bunny girls didn’t make nice centrefolds and what self-made Playboy-aspiring man wanted to be saddled with some kid he’d unfortunately sired when all he wanted was sex?)

In a 1999 interview with Hefner, NPR‘s Terry Gross commented on the 52-year age and power disparity between Hefner and his “girlfriends,” his life experience and the fact he has amassed a fortune; she observed: “They’re not even out of college yet so it wouldn’t be possible to function as your equal.” Hefner replied: “Is that of some importance?”

Female equality was not important to him – so why are so many people saying it was? Hefner sold a commodified view of women, and branded it as a form of freedom. What he did was, more accurately, orchestrate a diabolically effective backlash against the perceived “womanization” of America. It is no wonder, then, that “sexual freedom” came to look an awful lot like a male fantasy.

But this propaganda, outfitted in bunny ears and cottontails, has resulted in a putrid, retrograde and destructive legacy which no amount of post-mortem deification can sanitize.

In a final indignity to the most famous woman he famously exploited, Hefner is to be buried next to Marilyn Monroe, whose image he used on his first cover without her permission or payment. Though born in the same year as Hefner, she was dead at 36 after being “digested by the culture that consumed her.” And it is this culture which is the house that Hef built.

Pay Per View Torture: Why Are Australian Telcos and ISPs Enabling a Child Sexual Abuse Pandemic?

Internet Service Providers and Telcos, which provide the infrastructure for live-streaming abuse of children to be possible, need to cooperate with law enforcement authorities.

“There are examples where people have been wanting to see the violent rape of children five, six, seven years old; and other, very violent acts carried out against very young children.”

- Chief Judge John Pascoe

To all the piteous horrors inflicted on the youngest members of the human family around the world, a new atrocity has been added: “Live Distant Child Abuse.” There is a growing pandemic of this practice of paid-per-view torture.

This practice involves the real-time rape and torture of babies, infants and pre-pubescent children. According to a report from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, “59.72% of the abuse acts against babies and toddlers involved explicit sexual activity/assaults and extreme sexual assaults.” These are acts that are at the highest levels of the Copine scale – a rating system used to categorise the severity of images of child sex abuse.

The more violent the act, the more the user pays. The International Justice Mission (IJM) estimates that men pay between US$20 and $150 for a “sex show” broadcast online. “The cost of such a show will increase with the level of abusiveness requested,” the IJM wrote in a submission to the Federal Inquiry into Human Trafficking, arguing that these practices need to be considered in our provisions against sexual servitude and slavery.

Child sexual abuse online is described as a “global pandemic” in Behind the Screen: Online Child Exploitation in Australia, a new report on Australia’s response to online child exploitation by Anti-Slavery Australia at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney. Revealing the alarming scope of online child exploitation, the report, along with IJM’s testimony to a current Federal inquiry into human trafficking, and shocking examples of this child torture highlighted in the Senate last month, will hopefully give this issue the attention it warrants.

It is estimated by the FBI that there are 750,000 child predators online. Increasing numbers of them are using – and, in turn, driving – a growing industry of transnational cyber trafficking of children for sexual exploitation, which is streamed live into the homes of users. There are currently more than 150 million images and videos documenting child exploitation available online.

Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found that reports of child sexual abuse imagery rose by 417% between 2013 and 2015. In 2015, 68,092 reports were confirmed as illegal images or video, an increase of 417%, since 2013. It then looked at trends emerging from the 2015 data, finding that:

69% of victims were assessed as aged 10 or under;

1,788 of the victims were assessed as aged 2 or under;

34% of images were category A, involving the rape or sexual torture of children

Those working in the field say infants are increasingly attractive to abusers, because they can’t speak or defend themselves.

Meet Australia’s Sadistic Abusers

Australian offenders have a significant role in this sadistic trade. As at 1 June 2016, 194 Australian children have been identified as victims of online exploitation material. 102 Australian perpetrators have been identified, but this is only a tiny proportion of the 11,000 referrals made to Australian Federal Police in 2015.

Behind the Screens researchers state that, “More Australian based offenders are regularly accessing, downloading from, or even administering vast international networks that encourage the distribution of materials.” Australian-based offenders were “procurers, groomers and administrators of vast online child exploitation networks” and were driving abuse locally and in countries like the Philippines and parts of Eastern Europe.

Chief Judge John Pascoe has noted this disturbing trend in the Federal Circuit Court. He told the ABC’s 7:30, “There are examples where people have been wanting to see the violent rape of children five, six, seven years old; and other, very violent acts carried out against very young children.”

So, who are the Australian men involved in ”Live Distant Child Abuse”? Here are five examples. These weren’t just individuals operating alone – they were operating highly organized businesses, business gangs essentially, with many ties to each other operating in a global system of pornography. This is a collective practice, not the idiosyncratic crimes of a few perverted individuals. Men like these are not just watching pre-made images on a screen – which is, of course, bad enough – but are actually manufacturing the abuse. It is not possible to dissociate their watching from afar from the manufacture of live porn as cruelty and abuse.

Infamous online and contact offender, Peter Scully, was arrested in the Philippines for crimes including child trafficking, child sexual abuse, torture and murder. Scully filmed his crimes for internet clients for $10,000. Police and lawyers describe his crimes as “the most shocking cases of child murder, torture and abuse they have ever seen in the Philippines.” Senior police officers and prosecutors wept when they viewed one video called “Daisy’s Destruction”. Daisy was 18 months old.

In 2016, young Melbourne man Matthew Graham (known as “Lux”) was sentenced to 15 years jail for distributing hundreds of thousands of items of child exploitation material. Beginning as a schoolboy operating out of his parent’s basement, he became one of the biggest child pornography and “hurtcore” distributors in the world, with his websites attracting 3 million hits in three years. His crimes included videoing the torture and rape of a young child in the Philippines, and encouraging the rape and murder of a child in Russia.

Bryan Beattie paid as little as $12 to watch through his Skype account 17 children aged between 8 and 15 being sexually assaulted in the Philippines between 2012 and 2014. Beattie procured a local abuser and instructed him on the kinds of abuses he wanted to see. At sentencing, Beattie said he thought the children being raped appeared “happy.” Beattie is the first NSW man to be charged with a “pay per view” offence. He was sentenced in March 2017 to a maximum of 10 years imprisonment but is eligible for parole in February 2021.

Queenslander Stephen James Sheriff paid a Filipino mother of two girls, including a 10-year-old, for live sex acts. Despite being convicted of soliciting and accessing child exploitative material, he was released with a $500 fine. While his original sentence was 3 years, the lifetime of suffering he has brought upon these children was apparently worth almost nothing.

Kyle Dawson paid about $60 to watch by Skype the abuse of children in the Philippines. His victims were girls aged about 6, 10 and 12, and a boy of about 8 was also abused in a Manila slum. Captured in a sting operation, Dawson was sentenced in the Brisbane District Court on 26 July last year to 5 years in prison with a two-year non-parole period.

In 2015, Shannon McCoole was sentenced to 35 years imprisonment for charges relating to his role as head administrator of a global online network with 45,000 members.

Lower Sentences for Pay-Per-View Torture

On average, fewer than half of all convicted offenders are given prison terms, according to Anti-Slavery Australia in Behind the Screen. This pay-per-view torture, commissioned and directed by Australians, has received lower sentences than direct hands-on offending. According to Anti-Slavery Australia:

“Our findings, based on a review of recent case law, indicate that on average, defendants charged and convicted under Commonwealth provisions receive at most 2 to 3 years imprisonment, and where multiple charges are involved, these sentences are served concurrently … Even in cases where offenders have vast collections of child exploitation material, and have used internet services to groom and procure more than one child for the purposes of contact offending, the case law indicates that such aggravating elements increase the overall sentence only marginally.”

While the recent passage of a law to cancel passports of child sex offenders overseas is to be welcomed – more than 770 Australian registered child sex offenders travelled overseas in 2016 – the act does not deal with the fact that a growing proportion of offending happens without the offender stepping outside the door of his home.

In the Senate on 20 June, NXT Senator Skye Kakoschke-Moore said the Criminal Code was designed to address perpetrators travelling to abuse a victim, and failed to target those staying home while commissioning, directing and paying for the abuse in real time. Kakoschke-Moore proposes amending laws to crack down on Australian offenders who access the live online abuse of children overseas. She told the Senate, “Committing the offence virtually should make them no less culpable.”

Speaking later to the ABC’s PM program, Senator Kakoschke-Moore said: “We have jurisdiction over offenders here. Where those offenders are using the internet to commission the real time abuse of children to direct that abuse against the child over the internet they must be found guilty of an offence.”

Enabling Abuse: It’s Time to Hold ISPs to Account

There is also a push to hold ISPs to account. Internet Service Providers and Telcos – Telstra, Optus, iiNet and TPG – which provide the infrastructure for live-streaming abuse of children to be possible, need to cooperate with law enforcement authorities. Telcos are profiting from the global crime of child sexual abuse of the kind that happened to the children I’ve described.

Last week, the ABC’s 7:30 revealed that, in the first 5 months of this year, there were 79 cases where telecommunications companies did not provide the online information such as subscriber records, IP addresses or mobile data required to make an arrest. This equated to a fifth of cases being pursued. That’s 79 cases that cannot be investigated and prosecuted because ISPs consider the “privacy” of their (paying) customers to take precedence over the well-being of tortured children.

It is no wonder police tasked with building a case against suspected perpetrators – and who have to view material on a daily basis that would destroy most of us – are frustrated. One investigating officer interviewed for Anti-Slavery’s report lamented the lack of compliance by Telcos, which appear reluctant to assist with investigations of online child exploitation. The officer gave as an example investigating the abuse of a four-month-old baby and being told “can’t help” 4 times. After he called the E Safety Commissioner, the information was provided within 40 minutes.

Asked by reporter Alex McDonald what happens when there is insufficient information, AFP Commander Lesa Gale responded: “It stops. It ceases. It means we can’t do anything more. It means, if there is a child that’s been exploited, that nothing further can be done.” A child won’t be rescued and an abuser can keep abusing.

Anti-Slavery Australia says there is a lack of clarity relating to the legal obligations of internet service providers – which form “part of a chain which contributes to the distribution of child pornography on the internet” – to report child exploitation material hosted on their networks. Provisions in the Criminal Code and Telecommunications Act are “vague and ineffective.”

Senator Skye Kakoschke-Moore has flagged amendments to require ISPs to comply. She told the Senate that cyber sexual abusers were “utilizing the infrastructure of telcos to commit their crimes.” Telcos have a “social duty” to “ensure they do everything in their power to assist the AFP” in tracking people using their service to offend. Senator Kakoschke-Moore’s amendments will require ISPs and content hosts to provide specific information to the AFP such as IP addresses or personal details of the subscriber. The amendments would also increase penalties for non-compliance with an AFP request.

Australian ISPs and telcos are commercially mediating the abuse of children. The Australian government needs to take action urgently to make them act ethically. A peak body is needed to give the issue the serious, multilevel cooperation it needs. As Judge Pascoe told 7:30, “I think the public does have a right to expect that they will be part of the social contract; that they will be aware of Australia’s international obligations; and that they will do their part to protect children.”

Without urgent government intervention to address these human rights atrocities against children, the social contract is breached. We all become complicit in these crimes.

Are we OK with games that allow kids to perform eye lifts and nose jobs?

Melinda Tankard Reist

A large needle is jabbed into the lips of a young girl. Instantly they become sausage-shaped.

Another girl, oxygen mask over her mouth, has her nose cut into with a scalpel.

A larger-sized girl in saggy underwear has a hose attached to her arm to suck out the fat.

Where did I see these images? In games targeted at children. With online gaming apps like Girls Plastic Surgery Doctor, Mermaid’s Plastic Surgery, Princess Plastic Surgery and Superstar Face, children are given the opportunity to carry out eye lifts, nose jobs, and lip implants, and create entirely new faces using plastic surgery simulators.

The games instruct them in how to use ice to numb pre-treatment sites, lighten dark skin, decrease larger noses, carve off weight and achieve rounded eyes.

In one game, the player is positioned behind the counter of a sterile waiting room. A woman approaches the counter and a text box pops up that says: “She needs a nose job, please help her.”

In some scenes, the young (virtual) patients look like they are being tortured, their eyes full of fear.

But it’s all worth it because they are transformed from an “ugly” girl into Elsa from Disney’s Frozen.

Given that a growing number of young women are seeking Botox and cosmetic surgery, wanting desperately to plump their lips to Kardashian proportions, these games should concern all of us.

They use animated characters and vibrant graphics to glamorise — and normalise — cosmetic surgery.

But while women have always been told they should strive to achieve physical “perfection”, the rise of games that effectively groom children to seek appearance-altering surgery in the future signals a new normal.

After all, why would they “love the skin they’re in” when they can slice, shape and inject it into something “hotter”?

The Botox boom is filtering down to our kids

I speak in schools around the country, including primary schools, about healthy body image — children often tell me of body image concerns.

I’ve seen little girls pinch their tummies and say they are “too fat”.

Indeed, we know that a growing number of children are anxious, worried, and unhappy with how they look.

The 2016 Mission Australia Youth Study identified body image as a top issue of concern for young Australians, and the National Eating Disorder Collaboration reports that 70 per cent of young women experience body dissatisfaction.

And, while no-one knows exactly how much cosmetic surgery is being performed in Australia (reporting of statistics is not mandatory), there is unprecedented growth in non-surgical procedures like Botox, with Australians spending at least $1 billion on cosmetic treatments each year.

Anecdotally, a growing number of young people are having work done — lip fillers are particularly popular, seemingly made normal by celebrity culture.

It’s partly why the Australian Medical Board last year introduced a mandatory cooling-off period for young people under 18 seeking cosmetic surgery, and mandatory consultations for anyone seeking Botox and fillers.

“We know that younger people are often a bit impetuous and often are vulnerable in ways that more mature people aren’t, in relation to self-esteem, and concerns about appearance,” said Dr Joanna Flynn, chair of the Medical Board.

The companies profiting from the ‘body angst’ epidemic

The global technology companies that sell these games — Apple, Google, and Amazon — need to acknowledge that they are profiting from this epidemic of body angst, and introduce clear policies stating that they will not accept them from developers in the first place.

There are hundreds of cosmetic surgery games available through the various app stores for kids to play: a mix of paid and free, though most appear to be free (the ads featured within them generate revenue).

While some games are listed as available for adults only (for example, 17+, depending on the platform), their features undoubtedly appeal to children and there is nothing to prevent children accessing them.

Currently, the onus is on parents to report apps they consider to be unsuitable.

In fact, Apple removed some apps in 2014, and again in 2016, after receiving complaints, but they have since reappeared.

Which is why Endangered Bodies, The Butterfly Foundation and Embodied at La Trobe University have combined to petition them to remove these games.

Similar petitions launched in the US, UK and New Zealand have attracted almost 20,000 signatures.

‘Contributing to children hating themselves is not a game’

Sarah McMahon, a psychologist and founding director of eating disorder treatment practice BodyMatters Australasia, said she and her colleagues were seeing more cases of young girls and boys presenting with “clinically significant concerns regarding their appearance”.

“Kids are growing up with a stronger message than ever that your appearance matters, you can only look one way, and there is tremendous cost to not meeting that ideal,” said Ms McMahon, who is also the Australian spokeswoman for Endangered Bodies.

“If you don’t meet that ideal there is something wrong with you that needs to be fixed.

“Cosmetic surgery apps frame major surgery as a game, normalizing the procedures and trivialising their risk. These apps make choosing a new nose look as innocent and harmless as choosing a new outfit rather than the major surgery that it is.”

Of course, women have long been told they should strive for a “youthful” appearance, and that we are irrelevant if we’re not hot.

We are targeted everywhere — from airbrushed images in magazines and on billboards, the lack of body diversity in the fashion and beauty industries, to filtered social media images.

But contributing to children hating themselves is not a game.

Do we really want our girls to grow up believing that surgically altering their appearance is a normal part of being a woman?

MTR on ABC Religion and Ethics

We share in the Commons. This is a very old term that refers to public spaces inherited by, belonging to and affecting a community – the shared places in which we all live and move, work and play.

But our public spaces are contaminated, the commons mismanaged. No one has exclusive rights to these spaces, but advertisers too often engage in visual and psychological pollution, as if the commons belong exclusively to them.

This pollution happens most frequently in the presentation of women for gratification, consumption and profit. Corporate Social Responsibility, to which most companies now lay claim, is not reflected in images of women topless, having violence done to them, made submissive by fear, on their backs, up for it, adorning, adoring, decorative objects with nothing to offer but their sex. They are presented as passive, vulnerable, headless, short of clothing, as sex aids – and sometimes dead.

Why do advertisers address women in these ways, instead of in a way consistent with their dignity as persons? Why do they address the commons itself in a broadside against the very possibility of a civil society, respectful of the dignity of all?

Public advertising that addresses women in this manner conditions expectations and behaviour, and cultivates gender stereotypes in how we see and recognize others. Pioneering advertising critic Dr Jean Kilbourne, of the famed Killing Us Softly series, points out that ads do more than sell products: “They sell values, images, and concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normalcy. They tell us who we are and who we should be.”

Public advertising tells us who we are and who we should be in gendered terms: men are persons of entitlement and power with clothes on, and women are … not.

“A total of 109 publications that contained 135 studies were reviewed. The findings provided consistent evidence that both laboratory exposure and regular, everyday exposure to this content are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.”

We need to address the power of corporations to shape this diminished view of women’s competence, morality and humanity. But within this contaminated global commons in which we are all subject to this sensory assault, there arises some hope.

On 28 March, the Council of Paris voted for a new contract for outdoor advertising. From January 2018, the successful outdoor advertising company J.C. Decaux is required to forego advertising that propagates sexist, homophobic, ageist, ethnic and religious discrimination, along with “degrading” or “dehumanizing” depictions of people and “images that adversely affect human dignity.”

In a statement, Mayor Anne Hidalgo condemned advertising that teaches women that their degradation is acceptable: “The consequences of these degrading representations have an important impact on women, especially younger ones. They maintain ordinary sexism and help to trivialize a form of everyday violence.” Hidalgo said it was time for Paris to follow the lead of London and Geneva and take similar steps toward halting the “spread, promotion and valorisation of images that degrade certain categories of citizens.”

The Council’s move took place against the background of Saint Laurent’s Fall 2017 “porno chic” ad campaign. Ultra-thin women in fishnet stockings and stiletto roller skates were depicted splay-legged and draped over furniture. The Guardian reported that critics characterized the advertisements as “incitement to rape,” with the French feminist group Osez le Feminisme! (“Dare to be Feminist!”) demanding the “extremely violent” ads be removed. The campaign “ticks all the sexist boxes,” said Osez le Feminisme! spokesperson Raphaelle Remy-Leleu. “The women are objectified, hyper-sexualized and put in submissive positions.”

Under Mayor Hidalgo, Paris has developed an advertising campaign against the purchase and pimping of women. Paris has done what our cities should do. Yet, here in Australia our governments and regulatory bodies – while paying lip service to ending sexism and violence against women – continue to place the vested interests of advertisers over the wellbeing of the community.

A significant number of government inquiries and recommendations related to the impact of advertising, particularly sexualized imagery, on the community include:

The inquiry into the sexualisation of children in the contemporary media environment reported in June 2008. The committee stated: “This is a community responsibility which demands action by society. In particular, the onus is on broadcasters, publishers, advertisers, retailers and manufacturers to take account of these community concerns.” However, close to a decade later, almost all the recommendations – including for pre-vetting of ads, the establishment of a complaints clearing house to make it easier to send a complaint, and that a review of steps taken by industry bodies to address community concerns should take place 18 months later – have not been implemented.

In the 2011 inquiry into the regulation of outdoor advertising, the report (promisingly entitled Reclaiming Public Space) recommended that the Attorney General’s Department investigate unrestricted display of racist or sexualised images in the public sphere in the context of anti-discrimination legislation. That didn’t happen. The report also recommended that if self-regulation was found to be lacking, the Department would impose a self-funded co-regulatory system with government input and conduct five yearly reviews. The system has been found to be lacking, but nothing has changed to fix it.

A Queensland inquiry into outdoor advertising in January 2014 recommended a co-regulatory approach. This was dismissed by the State government which “considers the current system is mostly effective in regulating advertisers.” Recommendations from a 2014 West Australia inquiry also met with a lukewarm response from government.

The terms of reference for last year’s NSW inquiry into the sexualisation of children came to nothing. Remarkably, while tasked with examining the “adequacy of current measures to regulate sexual imagery in media and advertising” and while acknowledging strong evidence of harm, and that “concrete steps be taken” to eliminate the impact, advertising didn’t rate a mention in a single recommendation.

The Domestic Violence and Gender Inequality report of the Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee, also tabled at the end of last year, noted concerns about how gender roles and stereotypes can be reinforced and sustained through popular culture and media, yet failed to put forward any new policy to address this.

Governments continue to offload their ethical duties to citizens. Ours is a system that relies on complaints: citizens are required to do the regulating because of a “hands off” approach. While I’m all for civic responsibility, the dismissal of complaints and the terms by which they are dismissed make the job too difficult.

There are no pre-vetting of ads before posting – such as a bestiality image in the middle of Sydney’s CBD to promote Fox studio’s Sexpo, advertising on buses in school zones, billboards for sex clubs overlooking school playgrounds, General Pants shop windows covered with posters of women being stripped, and glamourized sexual violence as a marketing tool for companies like Calvin Klein and Wicked Campers spreading misogyny on every corner.

There are, moreover, no penalties for non-compliance. Despite complaints upheld against Wicked Camper vans for racist, misogynist and homophobic slogans and images, the company continues to ignore Advertising Standards Board rulings. The response of the shopping mall sex shop Honey Birdette to a recent board ruling was a contemptuous: “No one tells Honey Birdette when to take down her signage!”

Because so many complaints are dismissed and so few upheld, and because of the language in which dismissals are phrased, a message is sent that this kind of advertising is tolerable. The case-by-case approach to responding to individual complaints does not acknowledge the “drip-drip effect” – that is, the cumulative impact of all of it across society and over time. The way in which we absorb these messages is not on a case-by-case basis.

Those concerned about the treatment of women and girls in this hostile environment, and who are fighting for sexist advertising to be viewed as contrary to our anti-discrimination laws, are tired of their evidence-based concerns being dismissed by those tasked with governing for the common good. As my colleague Laura McNally, who is completing a PhD on Corporate Social Responsibility, writes, we have to tackle a culture of sexual objectification if we are to make any inroads in efforts to address violence against women:

“Sexual objectification creates a culture of impunity toward violence against girls and women. One where abusers feel justified because ‘she wanted it’. And one where girls feel disallowed to speak out because they are seen as mere objects. Objectification not only undermines gender equality but also thwarts efforts to reduce issues like violence against women. As documentary filmmaker Jean Kilbourne says turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person. The focus needs to shift, instead of scrutinising or blaming the girls and women affected, we must scrutinise the culture and industry that makes sexual objectification so widely accepted and increasingly expected of girls and women.”

The only changes that happen are when activist groups like Collective Shout (of I’m a co-founder) force companies to change due to hard-hitting campaigns exposing their corporate social irresponsibility. And, to address the glaring gap in governance, Collective Shout has launched a social responsibility initiative for ethical business behaviour. Companies are invited to sign the Corporate Social Responsibility pledge, which is a statement of intention not to objectify women and sexualize girls in products, services and advertising.

Those of us who have spent more than a decade tracking the multiple abuses in the system look wistfully toward Paris and ask: why can’t this be done here? Why would our government want to protect an industry that has shown little regard for the wellbeing of children and young people, who are especially harmed by advertising that conveys to them distorted ideas about their bodies, relationships and sexuality? Why doesn’t it compel the industry to act consistently with laws against discrimination and for equality?

The Australian government has its own obligations to social responsibility – namely, our government is a signatory of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Goal 3 of the MDGs is gender equality and empowerment of women. The Australian government has an obligation to action and report against this target, but also to collaborate with corporates in achieving them. Yet, the advertising industry remains free to shore up gender inequality with degrading and exploitative imagery in the public space. Not only are corporates regularly violating their own obligations to social responsibility, but the Australian government fails here too.

Governments across the globe are holding big polluters to account. Industries like oil and gas are increasingly expected to redress the health impacts of their environmental pollution. When will advertisers be held to account for the psychological harms of their visual pollution?

As citizens, we are not allowed to let our dogs defecate in public. Paris has decided that advertisers too, can no longer pollute the commons. Australia should do the same. Free markets shouldn’t have unfettered freedom to demean women and girls in advertising and marketing. Australia, it’s time to follow Paris.

‘This book helps parents understand how we can win back girlhood – happy, wild and free. It’s the core of individuality and self-belief – and is the new feminism that we want for our daughters’

Globally renown psychologist and author Steve Biddulph has been a remarkable support for our movement Collective Shout since the earliest days. He not only cared about the cause, he cared about us, as the individual activists at the forefront of this new grassroots campaigning movement against sexualsation, objectification and pornification. I recall one of our first gatherings as a core team in Sydney, Steve leading us in a session not on how we could change the world, but how to look after ourselves while attempting it. Since that time, eight years ago, Steve has continued to check in, with wise advice and wisdom about self-sustainability for the long haul.

I was honoured when Steve asked me to write a chapter on ‘Girls and the online world’ for his 2013 book Raising Girls, a follow-up to his million-copy best seller Raising Boys. Now Steve has again featured my work in his latest title 10 Things Girls Need Most: And How They Will Help Her Throughout Her Life (Finch Publishing). This new title, available through Booktopia, is already on the best seller lists.

The book is interactive. “These interactive tasks immediately get you thinking about your own life, your family and, of course, your daughter… It provides the very best information that we have about girls growing up today – and, alongside, are interactive tasks and self-exploration practices will help you to put that into practice”, Steve says.

Steve describes the aims of the book:

“Firstly, to help you understand how daughters grow and thrive, and to be confident in raising your own. To lay down the foundations of good mental health early in your daughter’s life, and to keep her strong all the way through. And secondly, to enlist you in the new wave of feminism, fighting against a world that is so toxic to our kids.

We have the potential to change the world our daughters face. Girls are being exploited. We need to challenge the companies worldwide that profit from making girls insecure and compliant through manipulative marketing.

This book helps parents understand how we can win back girlhood – happy, wild and free. It’s the core of individuality and self-belief – and is the new feminism that we want for our daughters.”

Here’s an extract from the chapter describing my work with young people:

A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

Melinda Tankard Reist is standing before an audience of two hundred girls aged from twelve to eighteen. Neat in their school uniforms, they are seated in curved rows on the floor. Uncharacteristically for this age group, they are utterly silent. Melinda is the founder of Collective Shout, a national network of young women campaigners against the sexual exploitation of women and girls. She will criss-cross to schools across the country giving this talk about ‘sex, porn and love’ dozens of times a year to girls of every ethnicity and demographic. When Melinda finishes speaking, the girls erupt in applause and besiege her with tearful thanks for her message. They will tell stories of their own experience – of being touched or assaulted by boys or men on public transport, of being leered at or spoken to obscenely in the schoolyard. Or, in their relationships with boyfriends, of feeling pressured into doing things they didn’t want to do, and of sexual encounters entered into happily and trustingly, where nice boys that they thought they could trust became aggressive, spoke demeaningly or physically hurt them.

When Melinda talks to boys about these issues, they often express shame and regret, recognizing they have acted in these ways, but not seeing how harmful and disrespectful their behaviour has been. They literally thought this was how you were supposed to treat girls.

The world our kids grow up in today sexually is not a happy place. Sex has been so misused, in advertising, the media and in music videos – and most powerfully of all in the torrent of online pornography – that it has badly distorted what young people think about how it works, and how it can be part of a caring, gradually unfolding relationship.

A recent study by the Burnet Institute in Sydney, Australia, found that 90 per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls had encountered pornography between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. Thirteen was the average age of first exposure for boys. Forty-four per cent of older teenage boys watch porn weekly, and 37 per cent daily. This indicates a fair bit of exposure. Pornography is a vast and highly profitable industry. Our consumer society is industrializing sexuality, and the kids are its first trial run….

…for the boys who see these depictions, the women in pornography are paid to act as if they like and enjoy this treatment – slapping, strangling, hair-pulling, and being called abusive and demeaning names. For a fourteen-year-old boy the mislearning about what sex is like is bewildering, if not dangerous.

Here is what Melinda (and educators like her) report from talking to adolescent girls:

1. They are being increasingly and persistently pressured into sexual acts that they don’t want or enjoy. This pressure often becomes the central focus of the relationship with boys who they thought liked them or wanted to be with them.

2. When once teenagers enjoyed hours of kissing, or had a relationship consisting of talking, laughing, spending time together and snogging, this now doesn’t happen at all. It’s too much a delay in getting to the goal.

3. Sex isn’t really sexy any more. There is no sensuality, no body pleasure, no tenderness. You are meat to be used. The sex girls have with boys is fourth rate.

4. As a result, by sixteen or seventeen, girls are often totally disillusioned about sex, put off it by the dismal lack of skill, awareness or connection offered by the boys in their lives. It becomes a routine, dreary chore to put up with if you want to be in the company of a male. (How progressive and modern!)

5. Sexual relationships that start at fourteen or fifteen rarely last beyond a few weeks, often less. They create a lowered bar, a kind of resignation, and drift into multiple, equally empty relationships.

This doesn’t just affect the girls who are sexually active. The effect on the social world that all our daughters move in – at school, university or going out in public on the street – is that it is constantly sexualized in an invasive and uncomfortable way. A girl finds she is being ranked and compared on sexual criteria on social media or even to her face. Some boys feel that they are entitled to touch or grope girls, harass them or worse. Some men gaze invasively at girls without any sense of respect or protectiveness.

Girls lose a sense of agency or that their needs matter. Melinda hears girls talk about their first sexual experience, being anxious only about how it was for the boy. ’He seemed to like it.’ ‘I hope I looked OK.’ There is nothing about their own enjoyment.

By mid-secondary school, requests for naked ‘selfies’ come thick and fast. Boys expect this from a girl they are friends with. Girls ask: ‘How can I refuse without hurting his feelings?’ But those photos may be traded among boys, used as revenge, or to blackmail them into having sex, then shared anyway. Girls in many countries have taken their own lives because of the humiliation or betrayal they experience, the sense of having their selves taken away.

Another sad side effect, is that non-sexual, actual friendships – once a great part of being young, and a stepping stone to greater confidence – have almost disappeared as everyone thinks they are supposed to be sexual.

SO WHAT TO DO?

In the face of this avalanche of hurt, the answer that educators and activists are giving girls is on multiple fronts, but has a central core. It’s the thing that sends girls at Melinda’s talks into empowered assertion of their own feelings. You Don’t Have To. Your own sexual wishes, enjoyment, values, and choices, are what you have a right to stand up for. You aren’t in this world to satisfy boys.

And how a pornified world harms our ability to achieve gender equality

“Pornified messages are bombarding our young people and giving them distorted ideas about their bodies, about relationships, and about sexuality,” says Melinda Tankard Reist, in this podcast interview, “According to global research, (this is) making our kids very unwell.”

Girls are experiencing increasingly negative attitudes towards their bodies, describing themselves as fat, disgusting and unworthy (even to live). Boys are comparing girls’ bodies with porn star bodies on the basis of whether or not they match up.

“And we wonder why girls are anxious and depressed,” says Melinda, “to me the mystery is that any girls make it through unscathed.”

Boys start seeing porn at an average age of 11, often viewing pornography that eroticises and glamorises violence against women.

“We’re teaching boys that violence is sexy,” says Melinda, “We have these national campaigns to address violence against women but we are doing nothing to address the cultural drivers of that very same violence.”

Drivers such as the normative, permission-giving beliefs to boys that girls’ bodies exist for their sexual gratification and pleasure.

“Boys are learning a sense of entitlement to the bodies of women and girls,” says Melinda, “and girls are learning that they exist primarily as sexual service stations for men and boys.”

Girls are so disconnected from their own sense of pleasure, intimacy, and authentic human connection, says Melinda, that when she asked a 15-year-old girl about her first sexual experience, the girl responded, “I think my body looked okay. He seemed to enjoy it.” [Italics, mine]

“Girls shouldn’t have to be navigating sexual requests at 11 and 12 and be assessed on the basis of their bodies,” says Melinda, “they are not being valued for their gifts, their talents, their abilities, their desire to change the world, to be a loving sibling, a devoted friend, their spirituality…they are not being valued for anything other than whether they look hot or not.”

This is making our girls very unwell.

Change is difficult but possible…and every voice counts.

This is the premise behind Collective Shout for a World Free of Sexploitation, a grass roots organisation co-founded by Melinda, that works to address the toxic messages of pornography that give our young people distorted ideas about their bodies, about their relationships, and about sexuality.

Melinda speaks to girls and boys across the country, empowering girls to say no to unwanted sexual intrusions and encouraging boys and girls to seek respect-based relationships.

“It’s difficult and it takes guts,” she says but change is possible and evident in the stories she shares in this interview.

Collective Shout is active politically and also works with corporations that want to take a responsible approach by agreeing not to sexualise women and objectify girls to sell products and services. It’s a big job but Melinda and her team are proof that when voices join together for the common good, they can indeed make a collective SHOUT!

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But if, as the promotion claims, this second instalment is the “dark side” of the “fairy tale” does this mean that every little girl secretly desires to be whipped, choked, harassed, stalked, manipulated and made to suffer physical and emotional injury at the hands of her prince?

After all, Anastasia is subject to this and more in the first instalment, which I saw – along with a cinema full of schoolgirls in uniform.

And herein lies the problem.

Abuse is served up to young women as romance: the first film was released on Valentine’s Day two years ago; the second in the lead up. Why say it with roses when you can say it with whips? In Fifty Shades of Grey Christian tells Anastasia that if she were his she wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week (because of the damage he would do).

This is a fairy tale in which the female lead is beaten with a belt and covered in bruises as tears stream down her face. Soothed only by his strong jaw, his baby grand, sports car and helicopter.

The film’s trailers pose the question: “Can love survive?” – meaning, of course, that Fifty Shades of Grey was about just that. Because nothings says true love like being controlled and stalked.

Fifty Shades is part of a wider culture in which women are taught their greatest power comes from being an object of male desire. We see a powerful man, corporate power player Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) prey on a naive university student, Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) whose virginity is a problem to be rectified. He proceeds to groom her for his sadistic pleasure. Sexual violence and emotional abuse – including threats, stalking and isolation – are represented as sexy and romantic.

What is in reality intimate partner violence becomes something women secretly desire – which puts all women at risk.

The first film depicted sexual violence – forced sex acts, contact against Anastasia’s will (stalking) and the use of alcohol to compromise consent. Anastasia Steele signs a contract in which she agrees to be submissive and meet Christian Grey’s every wish – and not just for the sex acts he wants. His specifications include what she can eat, how much she can drink and how she behaves at all times.

When unequal power relations and female submission are presented, not only as somehow romantic and desirable but as actually liberating and empowering, you know you’ve got a serious problem.

“Our systematic analysis of Fifty Shades of Grey, the first novel in the trilogy, reveals pervasive emotional and sexual violence in Christian and Anastasia’s relationship. Our analysis also shows Anastasia suffers significant harm as a result – including constant perceived threat, managing/altering her behaviors to keep peace in the relationship, lost identity and disempowerment and entrapment as her behaviors become mechanized in response to Christian’s abuse.

“Christian uses an interlocking pattern of emotional abuse strategies – stalking, intimidation, isolation, and humiliation – to manipulate and control every aspect of Anastasia’s behavior. These strategies are consistent with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s definitions of intimate partner violence.”

This is borne out by something that Teagan, a survivor of abuse, shared with me: “As someone who has recently gotten out of a abusive bdsm relationship I know what it’s like and this movie represents abuse. Currently reading the books now and actually reading what Anastasia feels really hits deep for me and I understand it all.” Sounds more like a nightmare than a fairy tale.

I think there are a few reasons for this romanticisation of intimate partner violence, each interconnected. The global sex industry is very good at getting its tentacles into everything. It knows how to embed and normalize porn-themed practices and ideas. Thus we have Target selling Fifty Shades of Grey themed lingerie and hardware stores selling Fifty Shades packs including rope, duct tape and other BDSM paraphernalia.

The broader culture effectively grooms women and girls for pornography consumption. Women imbibe a message that adopting pornified roles and behaviours is how they will attract men, keep men interested, stop them “wandering.”

In porn culture, women are sexual objects for male sexual gratification and pleasure. They are always available and willing, and they never say no. They enjoy painful and degrading sex acts done to them. Women are told they should want to be brutalized, to enjoy and welcome male sexual aggression We are encouraged to embrace it and find power in being dominated and brutalized by men. Fifty Shades highlights just how effective pornography has been in infiltrating the mainstream, with women now readily accepting their sexually subordinate position.

Women are supposed to enjoy porn, including violent BDSM inspired sex. The most popular genres of pornography feature violence against women – with women depicted as deriving pleasure from it. A young woman I know asked her new (now ex) husband, “How can I make it more like porn for you?” because he wasn’t interested in a normal (that is, non-pornified) woman. We are offered a commercialized version of sexuality. The latest manifestation of this is of an especially violent variety because everything else has been “done before.” Violence is the new black.

One repercussion is that women start to think there is something wrong with them if they don’t like this stuff. And teen girls think this is what “romance” looks like. So many young women describe coercion and pressure to accept sex acts they neither desire or enjoy. This film just adds to that pressure. I’ve had year 7 girls at an Anglican school ask me questions about BDSM. They want to know if a boy wants to whip them, choke them and tie them up does this mean he must really like them? Stalking comes to be seen as a sign of affection. I’ve read messages from boys on Facebook threads about the film saying how great it is because now they can get girls to do what they’ve always wanted them to do.

How will our young people understand what true intimacy and authentic human connection looks like when porn-based messages about sex dominate their formative environments?

“Girls around the world are born into a pornified culture where consent is rendered irrelevant. In real life, men use the same tactics as Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades trilogy to gain and maintain power and control over the women in their lives. This includes isolation, threats, physical and sexual assault. This is not entertainment. This is not sexy. This results in serious harm to women and in the worst case scenario, murder.”

We don’t have to see it. But any depiction of violence as romantic harms us all. As we say in our 50 Myths post: “Fifty Shades is a massively popular cultural phenomenon, perpetuating and reinforcing harmful attitudes about violence against women. Women cannot simply opt out of a culture that exploits or harms them.”

This is about raising awareness of the film and domestic violence. We want people to recognize that Fifty Shades glorifies abuse of women, and to ask themselves whether that is something they really want to support financially.

We are calling for potential cinema goers to put their money toward financially supporting some of the frontline services for women that are so desperate for funding instead. My friends who work in the women’s refuge sector tell me that their refugees are full of the victims of the Christian Grey’s of this world.

To get behind this campaign, you can participate on social media by using the #50dollarsnot50shades and #FiftyShadesIsAbuse hashtags; or for more information, visit the Collective Shout website.

Chocolate slice-shaming: Are we giving kids the wrong messages about food?

By Melinda Tankard Reist

About 15 years ago, a message was sent home from my daughter’s primary school teacher. It wasn’t about chocolate slice. It was about her hair.

My then six-year-old’s head was covered in tight, thick ringlets. While many clucked and cooed about her “gorgeous” hair, they didn’t have to wash it, or try to get a brush through it.

It was an ordeal, one I approached with dread — she’d cry and flail about. And so it wasn’t washed or brushed as often as more patient parents might have done.

(I also had two other children and a baby who needed attention.)

But then came the message from school: I must brush my daughter’s hair. Apparently it was unacceptable to send her to school with hair unkempt.

I felt put down. We might have tried a bit harder. Or we might have gone on as usual until she was old enough to do it herself (which was more likely).

Still, that teacher was lucky I wasn’t on social media in those days.

The story of my daughter’s hair came rushing back to mind this week when my long-time friend posted on Facebook a note her three-year-old’s kindergarten had sent home on the child’s first day.

“Your child has ‘chocolate slice’ from the Red Food category today,” the note, which featured a sad face, said. “Please choose healthier options for Kindy.”

When I reposted her note, along with the message, “I told her to put in two slices tomorrow and tell them to get lost”, I had no idea it would trigger such outrage.

It was shared hundreds of times, and was written up in news media outlets around the world.

Since then, I have been fielding media requests around the clock (will someone get me some bloody chocolate slice, please?!).

When ‘organic, sugarless’ muffins are sent home

The offending hedgehog slice (one mum, who texted in to 2UE, called it “satanic slice”) had been homemade for a birthday celebration and, as per family tradition, leftovers went to school the next day.

I’ve known my friend for a quarter of a century — I know the kind of mum she is. She makes everything from scratch, including bread, and bakes like there’s no tomorrow for her eight children.

Her kids are the kind who read books instead of watch TV. My friend and her husband both have degrees in health science — she is also a writer and researcher.

It could make children think that mummy and daddy had done something very wrong to receive something like that from their teacher.

Of course, I understand the importance of healthy eating policies. I appreciate that harried teachers are most likely just trying to carry out school policy (while also not being trained dieticians).

But I’m concerned about where this approach to eating takes us.

Since my post went viral, stories from similarly frustrated parents have flooded in.

I’ve been told of cases of children whose food was sent home uneaten — because it was not “approved” — and the child has had nothing to eat all day.

Organic, sugarless zucchini muffins; banana, almond meal and chia muffins; and homemade (nut-free) bliss balls have all been sent home.

Children have been told they were meant to have sandwiches, not muffins — even when their muffin could not have been healthier.

‘I can’t eat cake, Mum, it will make me fat’

Cupcakes — which had less sugar and calories than green-lit muesli bars — have also been sent home uneaten, according to one mum who did the calculations.

Another mother told me of a time when she’d sent her kid to school with a lunch box filled with apples, carrots, raisins and chicken … and a single, tiny chocolate egg, which the teacher promptly confiscated.

“My son was devo,” she said. “Then after school [the teacher] lectured me about healthy lunches. I blew my head off!”

Some parents told of children hiding in the schoolyard to eat homemade cookies, afraid of being discovered. Others said their children were ashamed to eat treats even at home — hiding food and eating it privately away from the family.

Children as young as six are presenting with eating disorders, and anti-obesity messages are partly to blame, the Butterfly Foundation says.

One young girl had reportedly stopped eating chocolate cake in any context. “Mum, I can’t eat chocolate cake because it will make me fat,” she told her mother.

When children see food as “good” or “bad” it can set them up for eating disorders.

Some eating disorder specialists I work with say the bombardment of messages around obesity is causing food anxiety and contributing to disordered eating behaviour in children.

It’s also worth considering the fact that many kids go to school without any food at all.

As Alice, who is training to be a primary teacher, wrote to me privately:

“I’ve seen kids come with no food at all on such a regular basis that every lunch time the teacher would collect uneaten food from other kids’ lunch boxes to put into a snack drawer to feed those kids who came to school without.”

She added: “It’s great this school is concerned about what their students are eating, because it does affect their performance in the classroom.

“But I think they have lost perspective here. Is it necessary to shame parents for what they put in the lunchbox?”

My friend ended up digging out the kindergarten’s food policy, which banned only “processed” cakes and biscuits. She hadn’t broken the rules after all.

But it seems an important discussion has begun.

Hopefully it results in positive outcomes for parents, schools and — most importantly — children.

PORN, Sexual Exploitation and why people are trying to silence the voice of survivors.

November 14, 2016 Danielle Strickland

I sat down with this global advocate and asked about her latest project, global prostitution, porn, the sex industry and why they hate her AND her latest book Prostitution Narratives… Melinda Tankard Reist is an author, speaker, media commentator, blogger and advocate for women and girls. She is best known for her work addressing sexualisation, objectification, harms of pornography, sexual exploitation, trafficking and violence against women.

Opinion: Our kids exposed to an adult world

Melinda Tankard Reist

The Courier-Mail is to be commended for its series on the hypersexualisation of our young people — especially the impacts on children by allowing them to be exposed to porn even before their first kiss.

What has been documented here in the Generation Sext campaign is what I’m hearing everywhere I go.

All are struggling to deal with the proliferation of hypersexualised imagery and its impacts on the most vulnerable — children who think what they see in porn is what real sex looks like.

They tell me about children using sexual language, children touching other children inappropriately, children playing “sex games” in the schoolyard, children requesting sexual favours, children showing other children porn on their devices, children distressed by explicit images they came across while searching an innocent term, children exposed to porn “pop ups” on sites featuring their favourite cartoon characters or while playing online games.

The website PornHub is in the top five favourite sites of boys aged 11-16 according to ChildWise UK. The biggest selling genres of porn are those eroticising violence.

Boys are viewing violent depictions of sex, torture, rape and incest. They are having their sexual arousal conditioned by depictions of extreme cruelty, seeing women being assaulted for sexual pleasure — all while their sexuality is under construction.

In Australia there has been a significant increase in reports of child on child sexual assault — identified as “copycat sexual predators”.

AMA vice-president Stephen Parnis says the internet is exposing children to sexually explicit content teaching them that sex is about “use and abuse”.

“There are increasing levels of aggression and the physical harm resulting from sexual acts is becoming more apparent,” he says.

The Australian Psychological Association has seen the problem first hand.

“Over the past decade, we have seen a growing trend of younger children engaging in problem sexual and sexually abusive behaviours generally aimed at younger children — in other words, children sexually assaulting children,” their Senate inquiry submission said.

Girls especially are bearing the brunt of porn-inspired boys who have imbibed a sense of entitlement to the bodies of women and girls.

We continue to hear the cry “Boys aren’t treating girls with respect!”. But there’s no mystery as to the reason.

Girls tell me about boys demanding sexual favours, demanding sex acts they don’t like, pressured to provide naked images (including girls as young as 11 and 12), being ranked compared to the bodies of porn stars.

One young woman told the South East Centre Against Sexual Assault: “When you have sex with a guy they want it to be like a porno. They want anal and oral right away. Oral is, like, the new kissing.”

There is a growing body of global literature testifying to how boys who take their sexual cues from porn develop sexist attitudes and aggressive behaviours — which has a trickle-down effect on women and girls.

For too many boys, the debasement they see on screen becomes real life debasement of girls.

In 2012, the UK Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection found that exposure to porn has a negative impact on children’s attitudes to sex, relationships and body image.

A 2012 review of research on the Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents found that adolescent consumption of internet pornography was linked to attitudinal changes, including acceptance of male dominance and female submission, with women viewed as “sexual playthings eager to fulfil male sexual desires”.

The authors found that “adolescents who are intentionally exposed to violent sexually explicit material were six times more likely to be sexually aggressive than those who were not exposed”.

In Australia, one in four young men think it is OK to pressure women to have sex.

Pornography normalises and eroticises violence against women as sexy. We have more than enough warnings by frontline service agencies about a public health emergency involving near-saturation rates of pornography consumption among men and boys.

This assault on the healthy sexual development of children has to stop if we want our children to engage in healthy sexual exploration and respect-based relationships, to know what real intimacy feels like.

The problem is so big and so vast it requires a whole of community approach. Parents, schools, educators, the medical profession, welfare groups, governments and regulatory bodies have to take action.

Fortunately there are signs that young people want something better. This is a message I received from a young woman who heard me speak.

“Hi Melinda. I was really touched by what you had to say and you opened my eyes to what sort of world we live in and at 16 I’m disgusted and amazed at what girls my age have to go through.

“You said something about being asked for nudes and that and personally I didn’t know what you meant by that as I haven’t been asked to do that … until today.

“To tell you the truth I wouldn’t have known what to do about it if you didn’t speak about it and I’m very grateful to you. The boy asked me for a photo or video and I said no — that’s when he called me “lame”. But I immediately told him I am more than just my body and you shouldn’t treat me like a piece of meat and instantly blocked him.

“Thank you for telling me that and I hope I have done the right thing and myself and other girls are taking action and we want to make a difference.

“I want to help girls feel like they are worth something. So thanks again you are an inspiration to us all and I hope to join your cause — Tiffany, 16.”

‘The foremost authority in Australia cyber safety lays it on the line and challenges parents to find their digital spine.’ – Dr Michael Carr-Gregg

Whether it is problems with friends, worrying about how you look or just feeling a bit down in the dumps – these books are written especially for you – to help you in your journey. Purchase all four together and save $18.50 on postage! Author: Sharon Witt

In this DVD, Melinda takes us on a visual tour of popular culture. “Melinda’s presentation leaves audiences reeling. She delivers her message with a clarity and commonsense without peer.” – Steve Biddulph, author, Raising Boys, Raising Girls

In this easy-to-read updated book, Steve Biddulph shares powerful stories and give practical advice about every aspect of boyhood.

Men of Honour -written by Glen Gerreyn- encourages and inspires young men to take up the challenge to be honourable. Whether at school, in sport, at work or in relationships, we must develp our character to achieve success and experience the thrills life has on offer.

Purchase the Ruby Who? DVD and book together for only $35 saving 10% off the individual price.

“Getting Real contains a treasure trove of information and should be mandatory reading for all workers with young people in health, education and welfare” – Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, Adolescent Psychologist

Do you read women’s lifestyle magazines? Have you thought about how magazines might affect you when you read them? Faking It reflects the body of academic research on magazines, mass media, and the sexual objectification of women.

Ruby Who? is the sweet and innocent story of a little girl’s adventure in re-discovering her identity. Ruby wishes for so many things and dreams of being like others. Will she end up forgetting how to just be herself?

Ruby Who? is the sweet and innocent story of a little girl’s adventure in re-discovering her identity. Ruby wishes for so many things and dreams of being like others. Will she end up forgetting how to just be herself?

Defiant Birth challenges widespread medical, and often social aversion to less than perfect pregnancies or genetically different babies. It also features women with disabilities who were discouraged from becoming pregnant at all.